in the southland. Tall and soldierly, this last gay army of the
flowers passes in review before her. Blazing stars in pink and purple,
tall and picturesque, with long rows of brilliant buttons; regiments
of asters in blue and white and purple; rattle-snake root with big and
quaintly slashed leaves and hundreds of tassels in delicate shades of
lilac, purple and white; swamp sunflowers in dazzling yellow, camped
in millions along the creek bottom to make it more glorious than the
historical pageant of the Field of the Cloth of Gold; plumy battalions
of golden-rod, marshalled by the sun along every country lane;
companies of tall, saw-leaved sunflowers with golden petals and darker
disks, deployed along the fences and seen at their best in the
twilight when they look like friendly faces with beaming eyes; as I
write them so they march across the land and bow farewell to summer.
There is no floral spectacle in all the land so fine as this march of
the composites over the Iowa prairies and fields in September. That is
the judgment of those who have travelled and observed. In the swamps
and along the ditches the blue lobelias flourish and the companies of
blue gentians are bringing up the rear to end the floral review,
begging the summer to wait until they pass by.

The little creek near which I live rises in a little swale between two
rolling ridges of the pasture. When it leaves the pasture only a
narrow box culvert is necessary to take it across the road, but before
it reaches the river, twenty miles away, a double-spanned bridge is
required to carry the road over it. In the pasture where it rises it
fails to furnish enough water for the cattle, but half way along its
course it sometimes washes out bridges in the springtime and farther
down it often floods the lowlands. Slipping silently among the feet of
the long grasses in the meadows it is scarcely seen at first; but
by-and-by it attains the dignity of a stream, winding through meadows